Date of Award

5-2019

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Global Governance and Human Security

First Advisor

B. Jane L. Parpart

Second Advisor

Anna M. Agathangelou

Third Advisor

Timothy M. Shaw

Abstract

Where Global Governance meets national public policymaking is not simply a place where failure or success is evaluated. This is an epistemologically significant point of convergence, where eclectic, complex interactions, test the capacity of Global Governance to be truly global. By drawing on three nationally placed, globally derived gendered structures of Global Governance, namely, the provision of Family Planning 1957-1967, the Domestic Violence Bill 1991 and the National Gender Policy 2002-2005, this research examines the politics of policymaking as an interplay between national and global forces in the context of the small, democratic, post-colonial, Anglo-Caribbean state of Trinidad and Tobago.

Using multiple levels of analyses of the militarily weak, and frequently, politically irrelevant, geopolitical space that is represented by Trinidad & Tobago, this research interrogates this democratic, postcolonial state’s longstanding engagement with, the politics of identity in public policy, as juxtaposition between the global and the local. The inquiry is anchored in the unpacking of the ontologies and narratives inherent in the politics of public policy making in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural spaces. The actors that give life to these ontologies and narratives include: The State, feminist organizing, religion and competing worldviews within the national community as expressed in contributions to the Letters to the Editor in local newspapers. The research brings to the fore the complex interchange within global gender regimes, as they are translated into ‘universals sought for the human condition’ across nations and over time. Détente, direct regionalism and delay become the substance of the interplay between the global and the local. Additionally, the conundrum of women, gender and development as the terrain of global public policy, lays bare nuanced interplays of national, local, international and global interests within public policy. Bringing life to the interconnections and hybridities created by the contending of the personal, political and the politically personal, in the public policy process, produces boundless challenges to realist constructs of globalness and Global Governance.

Comments

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